Just like the SOA Suite specialization path, Oracle is working on a BPM specialization path for certification.

Note: For the links used in this Blog item you need to have an Oracle Partner Account.

The following information was already made available for Partners:

BPM knowledge zone, in which you can become a member of Oracle Mix which is a Social Network to share ideas and to ask questions.
You can become a member of Oracle BPM Suite and Oracle BPA Suite.

There is also a BPM Bootcamp, just like the SOA Suite 11g Bootcamp. This is a 4-day bootcamp and as a prerequisite follow 4 webcasts.

BPM Sales Guidebook which can be used by the sales persons and contains some management summaries.

The implementation Certification is not ready yet but there are some assessments available for PreSales Consultant and Sales.
You can test your knowledge after the BPM bootcamp here with an online assessment.

2011/01/05

Introduction

Oracle has introduced the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud system, but what is it and what can you do with it?

This blog item is a small excerpt of the full article that can be found here.

The management summary

The Exalogic is: "the first system specifically designed to provide enterprises with a foundation for secure, mission-critical private cloud capable of
virtually unlimited scale, unbeatable performance, and previously unimagined management simplicity".
In other words the first private cloud supermachine and datacenter of the 21rst century.
It can run all kinds of applications of Linux and Solaris and is optimized for Enterprise Java, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle's Fusion Applications.

Overview

The next figure shows the hard- and software stack.

Hardware

The InfiniBand I/O forms the hart of the horizontal scaling capabilities of the system. Fast connection to Exadata Database Machines.
There is a small, medium or full rack configuration with respectively:

8, 16, 30compute nodes and 96, 192, 360 2.93 GHz XEON Cores.

Software

Java and the entire Fusion Middleware stack is designed for deployment on Exalogic, also the Fusion Apps will be deployable on Exalogic.

Exalogic is compatible with all standard Oracle Linux 5 and Solaris 11 applications.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager provides full management through Grid Control and OpsCenter in which every individual hardware component can be managed in real time.

There have been special performance optimizations made within the Exalogic for WLS, Coherence and JRockit and Hotspot.

Exalogic can be directly integrated with Exadata using InfiniBand, the JDBC driver and WLS data source infrastructure can communicate natively using protocols available on InfiniBand.

Also the Active GridLink for RAC within WLS will improve the performance of OLTP applications.

The WLS server also takes advantage of the underlying hardware in its thread pooling algorithm for optimal Java application performance.

Conclusion

Exalogic is a high end, all in one "datacenter" for high performance and scalable private cloud specifically for Fusion Middleware, Fusion Apps and Oracle RAC.

It will probably also create a vendor lockin because the whole infrastructure and Fusion software is optimized for this system.

But for medium to large organizations this may be a perfect solution for their enterprise architecture and the management of it.

2011/01/04

Introduction

This blog item highlights some points of Oracle for 2011 that will be be important for 2011.

Cloud in a box

As Larry Ellison stressed out:

The new competitive battleground in corporate IT will be centered on optimizing the performance of hardware-plus-software systems that have been specifically engineered for superior performance, speed of installation, and minimum of integration.